“But it is,” I insisted.
With a long, shuddering breath, she pulled herself together. “Thanks for coming.”
How could I not have come? I gave her a squeeze.
The lightbar flashed on the police cruiser in front of the 7-Eleven. The cop, having finished talking with Victoria and the manager, was scanning footage from the store’s security cameras.
“So do you get off the rest of your shift?” I meant it as a joke, to lighten the mood.
From Victoria’s cringe, she didn’t see the humor. She wriggled loose. “You know, you got here almost before the cops.”
I’d been at the pub just two blocks away when she’d rung my cell. Once again, Jonas had declined to join me. “You’re okay, hon.”
“I wish.”
“But you are okay.”
“Quit telling me that,” she said. “You weren’t here. You didn’t have a gun in your face.”
Her nose had started to bubble. I handed her a tissue from the box on the counter. “I’m sorry.”
Victoria blew her nose with a loud honk. I gave her another tissue and she wiped her face.
She said, “You didn’t rob the store. There’s no reason for you to be sorry.”
“I know.” But neither did I feel exonerated.
A police cruiser had sped past me, its lights strobing, coming from the direction of the warehouse. Had Jonas’s donations lured patrols away from the 7-Eleven? The bribes I hand-delivered each month to the precinct?
What if the gunman in the ski mask had robbed the nearby 7-Eleven, not some other place, because of Jonas and me? What if others would have been terrorized tonight and the experience would have changed their lives? What if in some alternate holdup, somebody would have gotten shot? What if—
I made myself stop. That way lay madness.
“Maybe I should spend the night,” I said.
She shook her head, and reached for another tissue.
“You sure?” I pressed.
“I want a new job. A safe job. And I want you to have another job. Something not mysterious.” She brightened. “Or apply here at the store. We have openings all the time.”
Absent Jonas and me, would the police have come sooner, maybe even been visible enough to have deterred the gunman? There was no way to know. But stocks not behaving as Future Jonas knew they had? That was a certainty.
God help the universe, in Jonas’s cloistered life I was the sole voice of reason.
“I like my job,” I lied.
“Well, I don’t.” In a small voice she added, “Will you walk me home?”
* * * *
I stayed for a while with Victoria in her apartment. The roommate was out somewhere, her liquor stash unguarded. I mostly drank and Victoria mostly vented, and neither treatment helped either of us to feel better. Just before midnight, after she dozed off on the sofa, I covered her with an afghan and let myself out.
I got to the warehouse to find Jonas working late. He sat at a workbench with his back to me. Rice sacks stacked like sandbags made a neat low partition by his feet. He’d been busy with more than the rice: the glass booth was assembled. And he’d done it without me. The man was freakishly strong.
Not only had the panels been put together; the enclosure looked wired. Through the glass, I saw a control panel mounted in the main compartment and a mass of gear in the floor-level compartment. The fattest power cable yet stretched across the floor, not connected at either end. An access panel hung open at the foot of the booth.
Jonas was shouting, his speech slurred. The line of beer bottles in front of him might explain both. I didn’t see anyone else, and guessed he was on his cell.
“Screw your advice,” he yelled. “I’m done. And I’ll get my own tips.”
I stumbled into a lab stool, knocking it over, and Jonas jerked around at the clatter. His eyes darted about. He poked at something in shadow on the shelf beneath the work surface. “Oh, Peter. I didn’t hear you come in.”
“I’m sorry if I startled you. Who were you talking to?”
“Myself,” he said belligerently.
“Well, I’ll leave you two alone then.” I beat a hasty retreat. My speech was muddled, too. “Good night.”
“G’night,” he answered.
The flight of stairs seemed even steeper and more rickety than usual. The vodka, I supposed. I looked with longing toward the elevator, but it had been inoperable—its heavy copper cables stripped by vandals—before Jonas first moved in. He had taken a free month on the lease instead of insisting on an expensive repair.
I dragged myself up to the second story. The moon was an ebbing crescent and the sky overcast; the hallway’s tiny, high windows only daubed the corridor with gloom.
Maybe that impression was the vodka, too.
Kicking off my shoes, I fell into bed without bothering to undress.
CHAPTER 9
I woke with a hangover, the vague intuition of a butterfly dream—and an epiphany.
I’ll get my own tips. The person-sized time machine was complete, and Jonas meant to jump forward!
I tried to remember everything about our brief late-night interaction. Jonas talking to himself. His speech had been loud and slurred. But maybe not all of it. When I’d first come in, before he knew I was there, hadn’t some words been clear and distinct?
Talking to himself, he’d said.
I paused outside his bedroom. Through the closed door I heard the familiar raspy snoring: he hadn’t taken off yet for the future.
Or had he gone and returned? My head hurt, and not just from a hangover.
I went downstairs. This time I counted the rice bags he had stacked by the booth: ten. Two hundred fifty pounds. For confirming the booth’s ability to transport his weight. Jonas weighed, in my best guess, two-ten or two-twenty.
The night before, he had poked at something after noticing me. I checked the workbench where I’d found him sitting. On its bottom shelf sat my old boom box. Through the smoky plastic of the access panel I could see something in the cassette drive.
I popped out the cassette. The label was hand-lettered, in a spidery style I knew well. Jonas’s handwriting.
Talking with himself, Jonas had said. Arguing was more like it. I carried the boom box and cassette into the kitchen. With the door closed, the volume turned low, and a sense of foreboding, I pushed PLAY.
“Hello, Jonas,” a familiar voice said. It was Jonas, and yet somehow it wasn’t. Too sad. Too world-weary. Staticky, too, and in some strange way distorted. “I know what you want to do.” There was a nervous chuckle. “I am you. Was.
“Here’s all you need to know: don’t. We made things worse. You’ll want an explanation, and that’s what I don’t dare to offer. What’s future must stay future. Anything sent back can’t fail to impact the timeline.
“Why send you this? Because I’m one stubborn son of a bitch. I know you’ll keep at it. I’m you, and I did.
“I’m giving you something I didn’t have. A gift. A choice. I’m giving you stock tips, winning horses, and championship teams. You never need work again. You never need obsess again. So: Retire. Frolic on a beach. Spare yourself from the misery I’ve endured—and the mess that with the best of intentions I’ve caused.”
“All right, you know.” Jonas said from behind me. “Shut it off.”
I pushed STOP and turned toward the door. My thoughts churned. “When?”
“The cassette came with the first smoke detector and the pages of investment tips.” He reclaimed his cassette. “If you’re wondering why he used tape”—and I was—“not even that first, crude prototype could garble a magnetic recording to the point I wouldn’t recognize my own voice. Future me wanted to contact me as early as he could.”
I started to make coffee, for something to do with my hands. They were trembling. “Why didn’t you listen to him?”
“Jonas five years from now knows things I don’t, but he’s forgotten things, too. He’s forgotten who
he was. He’s forgotten what’s important. If he supposes I have any interest in frolicking, that I can be bought off, he’s become someone undeserving of my trust.
“But I can redeem the long years that so wore him down. I can—no, I will—make a difference.”
* * * *
Jonas spent hours downloading web pages onto his smart phone: megabytes each for every looming threat and ominous trend that had a presence on his corkboards. “For reference,” he said, whether speaking to himself or to me. “It’s easier to find information while it’s fresh. There are lots of current events whose evolutions I’ll want to study.”
“Stay put,” I pleaded. “Listen to yourself.”
Jonas brandished his phone at me. “I am listening to myself. It’s future me whose opinion I’m discounting. He has no separation from events. He doesn’t know what advice to offer our time. But I know”—and once more he waggled his phone—“the world is running amok. It’s within my power to change things for the better.
“Look, Peter, you needn’t worry. I’ll go forward and scope out what’s changed. I’ll come back with a fresh perspective. Imagine a specific warning to the FBI before 9/11. Three thousand lives saved in a day and the Afghan war averted. Imagine if I could have warned that A.Q. Khan was about to start peddling—”
“Who?”
“Father of the Pakistani nuclear weapons program. Imagine a tip to the CIA before Khan started peddling his uranium-enrichment technology to North Korea, Iran, and Libya. As Khan did do. How much safer would everyone be today for that warning?
“Let me put it in your terms. Suppose I’d been able to show a few years in advance that the housing bubble was about to burst. How much misery could I have prevented?”
In their heart of hearts, who hadn’t known real-estate prices had become insane? That it was madness to extend loans without requiring documentation or proof of income or down payments? At the bank we had all known—as surely as we had known that till the bubble went pop, every house sold and mortgage refinanced meant profits, raises, and bonuses.
“People believe what they choose to believe,” I said. “The rest, they rationalize.”
“No, they’ll believe downloads of future newspapers. Perhaps not at first, but when the earliest predictions come true.”
“Only each disclosure changes the future. You’ve seen it with first future Jonas’s stock tips. What happens to your credibility after a prediction doesn’t come true?”
Jonas scowled.
I dared to believe he was listening. “What if there’s no operational booth five years ahead? He can keep you away with a flip of a power switch.” And God, how I hoped Future Jonas would.
“It’s more like three years now,” Jonas corrected. “Tempus Fugit. Look, Peter, nothing’s special about a particular arrival date. If need be, I’ll go forward a month less, or two months, or to whenever the booth remains in use. To whenever far forward future me retained his nerve.”
I was losing the argument, and I knew it. “But what if that future you is right?”
“Then I’ll learn that I can stop worrying.” Jonas laughed. “Then we can go frolic. Victoria, too. Because either way, I’ll come back with a fresh list of horses to bet on and stocks to buy. And I’ll share this batch.”
Victoria and me on a tropical beach? It was tempting. So tempting. And yet…
I’d been taught a hard lesson once about the perils of looking the other way.
“Whatever a timeline is,” I said desperately, “we’re screwing with it. Your gains are someone else’s losses. What changed when that money isn’t in someone else’s pockets?”
Or when the cash went into mine? I’d known damn well that secrets from the future made possible my raise, yet I’d been quick to take the money. And because of it approached a caring, funny, beautiful woman who maybe, in the universe’s grand scheme, I wasn’t meant to be with. Would I undo us if I could?
I brushed aside my doubts to keep pressing Jonas. “Can’t you already see the ripples? A blackout happened, or at least it happened when it did, because your windfall allowed you to speed up your experiments. What, in turn, might that blackout have caused? Maybe a baby or two will come nine months later?
“And what crimes or traffic accidents came about because the police shifted patrols to watch over this lab? I don’t claim to know how the future changed, but we do know your stock tips have gone—”
“All trivial,” Jonas snapped. “The world is going to hell. If I don’t act when I can, I’m letting that happen.”
Who are you to decide? I wanted to ask. I wanted to scream. “Yet two future yous told you to stop.”
“Maybe not two of me,” Jonas said pensively. “The two-years-ahead message might preempt the five-year-ahead message. Once looping and branching of the timeline begins…well, it’s complex. The universe will maximize its entropy.”
Loops? Branches? Jonas’s metaphors, if that’s what they were, confused me. But a butterfly flapping its wings? That metaphor, I understood. The gentle flutter of wings that tipped otherwise harmless weather conditions into a fierce hurricane…
If I hadn’t dug my stupid boom box out of Jonas’s junk heap, if I hadn’t unwittingly provided the clue that his time transporter needed a receiver, he might have given up. Except for me, this would not be happening.
I was that damned butterfly.
I said, “You once asked: If I could, would I warn the world about Hitler? You as much as said that you would. Here’s my question. Could the world have stopped Hitler if he had had your technology?”
Jonas jerked as though slapped. “Say that he had. Then it would have been all the more important for the good guys also to have the tech.”
I had run out of reasons. “Don’t,” I said wearily.
“I already did,” he shot back. My jaw dropped, and he laughed. “A final test, last night. I jumped forward by twenty minutes, waved, jumped back two minutes, and stepped out of the booth. Two minutes later, for a few seconds, two of me waved at each other.”
“When you jumped ahead, waving from inside the booth, did you see your other self waving back?” Because he hadn’t yet gone back those two minutes. But two minutes earlier is two minutes earlier. My head throbbed.
Jonas grimaced. “You know? I’m not sure.”
“Don’t,” I pleaded again.
In answer, Jonas stepped up into the booth. He shut the door, its latch closing with a sharp click, tapped the control panel, and disappeared.
CHAPTER 10
For what seemed like forever, I stared at the empty booth. How long would Jonas stay in the future, surveilling? A week? A month?
I had to laugh at myself. Would I never understand time travel? It didn’t matter how long Jonas chose to be away. If he wished, he could reappear within seconds.
Meanwhile, my head pounded and my stomach lurched. Food and aspirin might help both. I’d missed breakfast and maybe lunch, and that made me curious what the time was. Mid-afternoon? I glanced at one of the lab’s many clocks. 3:47 P.M. I started toward the kitchen.
Behind me, something beeped.
I whirled. The booth remained empty. A second beep sounded, and a third. They rang out from an aisle with Jonas’s earliest prototypes, seldom used.
The beeps stopped.
Within a transceiver the size of a microwave oven, taped to the inside of the glass of the door, was a sheet of paper.
In bold red letters, in my own blocky printing, the note screamed: DO NOT OPEN THIS DOOR!
Tiny computer text, illegible from where I stood, filled the bottom third of the page.
Between, occupying half the page, was the photo of a man. Blood streamed from his nose and eyes, and mottled flesh was sloughing off his face.
It was Jonas.
* * * *
He had, according to the fine print, the doomsday plague.
The virus had first appeared in 2013. Lethal. Incurable. Airborne and extremely contagious.
The toll: four billion dead worldwide, and counting. Whole cities, even countries, depopulated. Civilization imploding, while Radical Naturists—fewer of them, too, every day—exulted. A pandemic beyond the reach of medical science, until a vaccine was developed in 2016.
A curiously strange breakthrough, according to experts. Without the technology that had made possible the vaccine, it seemed impossible to have gengineered the plague virus.
* * * *
STOP JONAS, my future self concluded his note.
Stop him, how? Jonas had invented time travel. He had created the technology by which, apparently, some madman brought bioengineered pathogens to our defenseless era.
Did traces of the virus lurk within this transceiver? How much had seeped out the door seal while I gaped, dumbstruck, at the note? Or was this an early enough transceiver that nothing living could cross time still viable? I didn’t remember, but hopefully future me had had the records with which to chose wisely.
Somehow I shook off my paralysis. I would send this news farther back. It had stunned me. A copy would as profoundly shock my yet earlier self! I, he, would make Jonas see reason.
With the camcorder, through the transceiver’s glass door, I captured an image of the page. I downloaded the hi-res shot to a computer and started printing copies.
And stopped.
Future me might as easily have sent his warning farther back. Maybe he had. I’d taught myself to ignore the incessant beeping from Jonas’s tests.
Had Jonas already seen this note? For all I knew he’d gotten it and ignored it, just as he had disregarded Future Jonas. Perhaps my Jonas had been so determined to go forward because he meant to fix matters in his own way.
If. Maybe. Perhaps.
I had dithered once before at a critical juncture—ruining my life, and Amy’s, and the lives of everyone I’d help push out of their homes.
Squaring my shoulders, I resolved to act.
* * * *
Easier said than done.
Pushing with all my strength, I couldn’t budge the booth, much less tip it over. Take a fire axe to it? That seemed workable till I remembered the high-voltage cable. I’d probably electrocute myself.
Time Out Page 5
